Taking ginger pills can make disgusting ideas more palatable

January 11, 2019

Your gut feelings really do shape what you think

Francesco Carta / Getty

By Sam Wong

We often say our sense of morality is guided by our gut feelings – and this may be truer than we realise. A set of experiments using the anti-nausea powers of ginger have provided the strongest evidence yet that bodily sensations play a key role in some of our moral judgements.

Previous studies have reported that the more disgusted people feel, the more wrong they judge moral infractions to be. However, it’s not clear whether feelings of disgust guide moral judgements, or if it’s …